The day opens drearily, chilly, and damp and raw, with a feeble sun breaking through the lowering clouds; soon after noon the streets begin to fill with soldiers.  Till this year the Corso used to be guarded, and the files of carriages kept in order, by the Italian pontifical dragoons, the most warlike-looking of parade regiments I have ever seen.  Last spring, however, when the war broke out, these bold dragoons grew ashamed of their police duties, and began to ride across the frontier without leave or license, to fight in behalf of Italy.  The whole regiment, in fact, was found to be so disaffected that it was disbanded without delay, and at present there are only some score or so left, who ride close behind the Pope when he goes out “unattended,” as his partisans profess.  So the dragoons having disappeared, the duty of keeping order is given to the French soldiers.  There are soldiers ranged everywhere:  along the street pavements there is one long line of blue overcoats and red trousers and oil-skin flowerpot hats covering the short, squat, small-made soldiers of the 40th Foot regiment, whose fixed bayonets gleam brightly in the rare sun-light intervals.  At every piazza there are detachments stationed; their muskets are stacked in rows on the ground, and the men stand ready to march at the word of order.  In every side-street sentinels are posted.  From time to time orderlies gallop past.  Ever and anon you hear the rub-a-dub of the drums, as new detachments pass on towards the Corso.  The head-quarters at the Piazza Colonna are crowded with officers coming and going, and the whole French troops off duty seem to have received orders to crowd the Corso, where they stroll along in knots of three or four, alone and unnoticed by the crowd around them.  The heavy guns boom forth from the Castle of St Angelo, and the Carnival has begun.

Gradually and slowly the street fills.  One day is so like another that to see one is to have seen all.  The length of the Corso there saunters listlessly an idle, cloak-wrapt, hands-in-pocket-wearing, cigar-smoking, shivering crowd, composed of French soldiers and the rif-raff of Rome, the proportion being one of the former to every two or three of the latter.  The balconies, which grow like mushrooms on the fronts of every house, in all out-of-the-way places and positions, are every now and then adorned with red hangings.  These balconies and the windows are scantily filled with shabbily-dressed persons, who look on the scene below as spectators, not as actors.  At rare intervals a carriage passes.  The chances are that its occupants are English or Americans.  On the most crowded day there are, perhaps, at one time, fifty carriages in all, of which more than half belong to the forestieri.  Indeed, if it were not for our Anglo-Saxon countrymen, there would be no carnival at all.  We don’t contribute much, it is true, to the brilliancy of the coup d’oeil.  Our gentlemen are in